Rave Culture and Religion

2 Ephemeral spirit Sacrificial cyborg and communal soul Hillegonda C.Rietveld The amplified dance music carries me into another ...

strong sense of community on the dancefloor. In this way, a contemporary sense of spirituality is achieved. Yet, despite the exp ...

So, spirituality, like sexual joining, can be achieved ritually. However, the meaning of such experience is variable, depending ...

material power relations in a neo-conservative fashion (Kumar 1995). Ignoring complex social and historical analysis, in popular ...

taking empathy-inducing drugs, such as Ecstasy For example, in her study of women at raves, Pini points out that ‘raving’ is ‘co ...

‘robot dance’, globally popularized by Michael Jackson) during the early 1980s, which left its mark on early forms of techno. Al ...

the manual and makes wetware mistakes (Rietveld 1998b). Without batteries, the Roland 303 (analogue) bass sequencer had lost its ...

Sacrificial cyborg This experience, artificial and machine-like as it may be, can be perceived as transparently natural and trib ...

experience. This can be a techno-pagan post-historic or a more refined spiritual feeling, abstract and indefinable, Zen-like. In ...

Especially in enclosed environments, such as clubs, the warm, moist bodies of the crowd within a dark space or distorted visual ...

group dancing is historically associated with the feminine, with women and gays. House music, providing the dominant structure f ...

they are outnumbered by male fans. It seems as though many women in the dance scene care less about techno as a musical aestheti ...

I’m sixteen years old, don’t know anything about gay people, so I’m sitting on the wall the whole night, you know, guarding my b ...

This relationship seems particularly significant in terms of a vulnerable sense of masculinity which is worked out at homo-socia ...

Huyssen, A. (1986) ‘The vamp and the machine’, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism, Basingstoke an ...

Thornton, S. (1996) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge: Polity. Todorov, T. (1984) Mikhail Bakhtin: ...

Part II Dance, rapture and communion ...

3 Rapturous ruptures The ‘instituant’ religious experience of rave François Gauthier My personal opinion is that savage religion ...

the following must be stressed: first, that over a decade after the birth of raves in England, clandestine scenes still thrive i ...

As a first rule of thumb, we can state that the institution is always instituted by an instituant, and that the instituant is al ...